(You will find
the links to the various countries at the bottom of this page)

Regardless of
which alliance they belonged to in the war, all combatant nations faced
certain common domestic challenges. For the primary combatants of
Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Great Britain, Russia and Italy, it
was the mobilization of the entire nation for "Total War". As
many historians have correctly observed, World War One was the first
major conflict in human history which required the mobilization of
entire societies. The ongoing drain on manpower, national productivity,
material resources and money was beyond the traditional ability of
limited segments of society to provide. For all of the combatant nations
World War One quickly ramped up to requirements for men and material
that were beyond all expectations, and for which history had not
prepared them.

Three brief
examples illustrate this point. At the onset of the war in August 1914,
the entire French army had 4,000 artillery pieces. This was thought to
be enough for victory. France was to build another 36,000 before the war
ended. France's 2,500 automatic weapons were a mere token of the 315,000
machine guns to come. Germany, which had had a standing army of 850,000
men when she confidently went to war sure of "victory by
Christmas", had 6,000,000 men in uniform by January 1916. France,
with two-thirds the population had an equal number under arms. All of
these soldiers had to be clothed, equipped, fed, transported and
provided with weaponry and ammunition. All of this took money, and the
financing of the war effort became a major concern and preoccupation of
the government in each nation.

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The response of
governments to the requirement for exceptional revenue in times of war
takes five forms: increased taxation, confiscation (usually from
occupied populace), government to government loans, borrowing from
private banking interests, and borrowing from the public. The
cards in this section are all propagandistic appeals to the masses in
relation to this last method - borrowing from the public. All of these
are original appeals to the people to voluntarily purchase or subscribe
to war loans. War loans were interest-bearing bonds issued by each
nation's central government with a promise to redeem principal plus
earned interest at a designated time in the future.

In reviewing the
money raising propaganda cards in this section one can see that there is
a higher degree of common usage of the propaganda art, across
nationalities, in this subject than in the other "patriotic"
appeals. This is because all the governments had to demonstrate that the
money the citizenry voluntarily gave, was used to directly benefit the
war effort and the citizen soldiers doing the fighting. Therefore these
appeals make heavy use of the image of soldiers, airmen and sailors.
They show the tools of war that the military needs to do its job, and
thereby assure the masses that their monetary sacrifice is going
directly into the prosecution of the war effort.

We must finish
the war right.

The patriotic appeal is
direct and focused: these men risk the ultimate sacrifice of giving
their lives in defense of the nation, can civilians not sacrifice mere
money to support and arm them? The aim of the multi-national
propagandists is very succinctly symblized by a quotation from American
Secretary of the Treasury, MacAdoo, in 1917:

"Shall we be more tender with our dollars than with the lives of
our sons?"